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This page is a draft for a proposed new WP:SUST guideline. |
This page in a nutshell: Summary statements in an article must be supported by text in the article itself. |
All material in Wikipedia must be attributable to a reliable published source. A statements in an article may summarize parts of the article itself, in this case the statement is attributable to a section of the article itself. Summary statements may not be attributable to another article.
Summary statements are typically used in the lead of an article or in the introduction to a section with subsections.
Key principles
editThe problems with copying the citations from the section being summarized to the summary statement are:
- It divorces the lead from the article in as much as instead of describing a part of the article it is describing what is in a source instead.
- Citations get duplicated meaning people must learn about named citations or have a mess at the end.
- The leader tends to have a long list of citations after individual statements since they summarize a number of sources.
- It makes the leader stilted and less approachable instead of being an easy introduction into the article.
These problems are made worse by the way readers are likely to put a {{citation needed}} into the lead of an article since the lead is the first place they see the problem.
Summary style citations
editA summary citation refers to what's summarized.
For example 'Monsoons in Mojimbe regularly kill thousands of people.[Monsoons]' refers to the section 'Monsoons' instead of listing the various citations from that section.
Problems in summary statements
edit- {{summary disputed}} where someone thinks the summary is plain wrong or misleading
- {{summary improve}} where it just doesn't summarize reasonably well